Hi guys. I’m wanting to give my players a larger ship kind of like the Serenity or Ghost. In doing so that really limits the pilot’s ability. Is there anything that allows for the treatment of a ship as a smaller silhouette in regard to piloting? How would you guys handle this situation?

Thanks in advance.

No there isn´ t, but you can houserule it, because the Ghost or Serenity would be on the lower end of Silhouette 5 Ships ( CR90 Corellian Corvette the upper end).

You could do a minor rewording of the Tricky Target talent, allowing it to drop the ship's silhouette rating for the purposes of maneuvering as well, but that would let you dog fight with a Corellian Corvette.

Dropping the Sil score of the VCX-100 or similar ships down to 4 could also work, as they are borderline anyway.

Personally I would just increase the speed of the ghost to 4, which allows for K-Turns from the hotshot tree and covers the only really lacking thing of the VCX-100. The lack of evasive maneuvers is not really problematic imho, though if you think it is, you might want to increase the armor by 1, recommend the players to increase the armor further via an mod and maybe recommend the rigger spec for another point of armor.

Well or just go ahead with the superior C-ROC Gozanti or completely rework the VCX-100, either has oversized sil 4 ship or as sil 5 with benefits. In general the VCX-100 has it's used based it's low price and the ability to equip a retrofitted hangar bay, but it does not seem to be a keeper, unlike portrait in the rebels series.

This came up in a campaign I run that was converted from the old D6 system. Here the PCs had a large freighter (silhouette 5 under these rules) that had been used with a special operations group during the Clone Wars, and as such came with a few extra modifications. One of those was a system booster that, under the previous rules, allowed them to boost the speed of the ship for a few rounds. However, in this system this is pretty much handled by the Full Throtte talent.

Since piloting a silhouette 5 ship is somewhat less fun for the pilot as it gives him/her fewer things to do in a round, and they just had this custom device that had been rendered obsolete by the new rules, I came up with the idea of changing its function somewhat. It is now activates with a Piloting (space) or Mechanics check, and allows the ship to handle as a silhouette 4 vessel for all intents and purposes except for using the Gain the Advantage action (the ship has enough guns that I thought it would be a little overkill). However, for every round that it's active it inflicts 3 system strain on the ship, in addition to all the usual sources of system strain.

We haven't really used it a lot since it's a pretty recent conversion, but it seems to be working good so far. The pilot is happy that he gets to use all his piloting-specific talents more, and everyone seems to be having more fun with the ship. So maybe something along those lines could work for the OP's group as well?

A series of thrusters placed around the ship could allow it to handle better than it's class, but unless it was designed for it there would be a lot of strain on the hull/systems. @Krieger22 have you considered that instead of 3 per round, it's 1 per round due to the drain on the system from all of those extra thrusters and then every time they use a maneuver that they normally wouldn't be able to do it's one HT and one SS to represent the stress on the hull and systems?

21 hours ago, Ahrimon said:

A series of thrusters placed around the ship could allow it to handle better than it's class, but unless it was designed for it there would be a lot of strain on the hull/systems. @Krieger22 have you considered that instead of 3 per round, it's 1 per round due to the drain on the system from all of those extra thrusters and then every time they use a maneuver that they normally wouldn't be able to do it's one HT and one SS to represent the stress on the hull and systems?

That's not a bad idea, but in this case that would be every round, since the whole point of the gadget was to let them do more stuff. I don't like inflicting arbitrary hull damage on them, since you can only make one repair check per encounter and my thought behind this wasn't to bleed them of money for constant repairs. I thought it more interesting to set the system strain cost as high as I did because that would force them to make more tactical decisions, like having one or more characters use their action to recover system strain in any given round as opposed to shooting or making other actions.

And I neglected to mention that the effect lasts for a number of rounds indicated by the initial check, and cannot be voluntarily turned off until the duration has run its course (unless the character activating it rolled a Triumph on that check). So system strain has suddenly gone from being mostly irrelevant (a silhouette 5 ship can only use one Pilot Only manoeuvre each round, and cannot use the Punch It! manoeuvre) to being so important that characters keep heaving sighs of relief that they bought several ranks of the Fine Tuning talent.

Does the Genesys System have a better way to handle silhouettes?

And just keep it simple: Ship Typ X is now treated as sil 4. It´ s not a pvp game, where you have to balance everything out. Rule of Cool!

RAW you can drop the sil from 5 to 4 by applying nightshadow coating and the reduce silhouette by 1 during combat mod

18 hours ago, user1453 said:

RAW you can drop the sil from 5 to 4 by applying nightshadow coating and the reduce silhouette by 1 during combat mod

That was iirc RAI just like tricky target to reduce the sil when becoming a target, but not to make the ship handle differently.

On 1/2/2018 at 2:07 PM, user1453 said:

RAW you can drop the sil from 5 to 4 by applying nightshadow coating and the reduce silhouette by 1 during combat mod

That just changes the silhouette for targeting purposes it doesn't make the ship shrink.

raw

• Reduce the ship's silhouette by 1 in combat

22 hours ago, user1453 said:

raw

• Reduce the ship's silhouette by 1 in combat

You need to read the talent’s full text, not just the “bullet” text in the talent tree.

No, that is the full extent of the text on the modification for the Nightshadow Coating in Fly Casual.

I was quite surprised, as it does seem rather crazy.

It's the difference between RAW and RAI. It happens several times throughout most game books.

If you really want to do it, and you don't want to just "give" it to the party, come up with a modestly to extremely expensive modification that reduces a ships' silhouette by 1 for handling purposes only, and call it "Advanced Maneuvering Thrusters." It takes up 1 hard point. If you feel particularly generous, tack on a Increase Handling by +1 mod or two, for the low, low price of however-much-money-you-need-to-get-out-of-their-grubby-little-hands-at-the-time.

I guarantee your pilot will be drooling over it to the point of distraction.

Bummer is, there are only a handful of underground shops that will do it, so it's not just pricy, but you need to find the place, and then do whatever shady **** the mechanic needs handled.

Boom: your party gets a ship that does what they want and does what you want, you get at least a few adventures out of it, and everyone wins...

FWIW, another option is to have a smaller ship (sil 3) that is apart of the larger ship (either via hanger or magnetic locks). That way the pilot can jump into their personal star fighter and whoop some tail. With the larger ships, they pretty much drive themselves. Nothing is lost by having an NPC droid pilot the ship.

Both the Ghost and Serenity had shuttles that dock in it. So should fit thematically with what you are trying to do.

I personally like the C-ROC and HWK-290 combo. But that is just me.

Our Edge group has done just that, with HT-2200 and HWK-290. Hopefully the HT-2200 will be replaced when Fully Operational arrives.

On 2018-01-05 at 6:17 PM, Arrakus said:

FWIW, another option is to have a smaller ship (sil 3) that is apart of the larger ship (either via hanger or magnetic locks). That way the pilot can jump into their personal star fighter and whoop some tail. With the larger ships, they pretty much drive themselves. Nothing is lost by having an NPC droid pilot the ship.

Both the Ghost and Serenity had shuttles that dock in it. So should fit thematically with what you are trying to do.

I personally like the C-ROC and HWK-290 combo. But that is just me.

ARC fighter would be hella cool for this.